Debian Celebrates Its 24th Birthday

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Celebrates Its 24th Birthday

Yesterday marked GNOME turning 20 while today Debian developers and users have its 24th birthday of the project to celebrate...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-Day-24

[Rholk]

Typo at the end: debian 10 and not 1.0.

[wdb974]

Happy birthday, Debian! Congrats to the devs!

[AndyChow]

Debian was the first GNU/Linux distro I touched. A summer in either 1999 or 2000, I got the 2.1 release CDs. Nothing worked.

Do you think you could push the button on the CD-drive and have the tray open? Nope. You had to do that by command line. You had to use another command to close the tray. Sound cards didn't work, I doubt printing worked. The only thing I remember that wasn't a headache was connecting to the internet, dial-up style.

It's come a long way. Through it all, Debian is one of the few that never compromised their vision or mission statement.

Happy birthday Debian!

[M@GOid]

Debian was the first GNU/Linux distro I touched. A summer in either 1999 or 2000, I got the 2.1 release CDs. Nothing worked.

Do you think you could push the button on the CD-drive and have the tray open? Nope. You had to do that by command line. You had to use another command to close the tray. Sound cards didn't work, I doubt printing worked. The only thing I remember that wasn't a headache was connecting to the internet, dial-up style.

It's come a long way. Through it all, Debian is one of the few that never compromised their vision or mission statement.

Happy birthday Debian!

I remember those days. To me it has to do with the mentality of some developers/users of the time. Much of the user friendly things did not get in to the distros because some thought "that is not the Unix way" or other crap excuse.

Here in Brazil, a guy named Carlos E. Morimoto got a lot of flack from those people, because his Debian spin called Kurumin, that implemented the button eject CD-ROM and a lot of other amenities, that today we take from granted, but before you have to work for it. Because it was by far the most popular Linux distro in Brazil on the early 2000's, Morimoto got a lot of trolls and detractors. By the end of 2000's, he dropped the development, since Ubuntu could supply that niche better, with a company behind it. He became a Hare Krishna devotee and let the computer days behind him, to much of Kurumin users dismay.

Some people love to say Canonical didn't contribute to the Linux/Opensource landscape, but a strongly disagree. Their user friendly mantra finally got over the old arcane mentality of what a Linux distro should be, and today we can press a God damn button and see the driver tray eject, as it should be since the beginning.

[AndyChow]

Wow, crazy story about how he became a Hare Krishna. I remember those arguments well about the cd-button thing. "In UNIX, everything is a file. The CD-drive is a file. Files don't have buttons", and "besides, you can write a script, and then that script can be a command like "eject", and you just run that". I thought those people were insane.

Ubuntu was the best distro for a while, but when it changed from earth brown to purple, it all went downhill quick. And then they started putting ads and selling things when you searched for a files? (Something like that, I left them before they pulled that junk).

And then Arch was great for a while. Then they decided to remove their installer. "You don't need an installer, just type these command lines for 2 hours and it's the same thing". I think those people are insane. With Gentoo at least you get flags, but Arch it's all binary pre-compiled stuff anyway. No one has time for that.

A lot of great distros popped up through the years, but Debian is the only one I know that has stayed true. Maybe Slackware also, but Slackware was never great IMO. The only thing people don't like is how old everything is on stable, But, except if you're using something like BTRFS, old is more stable.

Debian is the turtle that will finish the line. If I had to bet which distro will still be around 20 years from now, and still defining the ecosystem, I'd go all in on Debian.

[sarfarazahmad]

debianxfce hasn't posted anything yet. I don't believe it.

[szymon_g]

debianxfce hasn't posted anything yet. I don't believe it.

don't you dare to call the devil out!

[unixfan2001]

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people that Debian testing on a custom kernel running XFCE as a desktop is the way to go...

[moilami]

Wow, crazy story about how he became a Hare Krishna. I remember those arguments well about the cd-button thing. "In UNIX, everything is a file. The CD-drive is a file. Files don't have buttons", and "besides, you can write a script, and then that script can be a command like "eject", and you just run that". I thought those people were insane.

Ubuntu was the best distro for a while, but when it changed from earth brown to purple, it all went downhill quick. And then they started putting ads and selling things when you searched for a files? (Something like that, I left them before they pulled that junk).

And then Arch was great for a while. Then they decided to remove their installer. "You don't need an installer, just type these command lines for 2 hours and it's the same thing". I think those people are insane. With Gentoo at least you get flags, but Arch it's all binary pre-compiled stuff anyway. No one has time for that.

A lot of great distros popped up through the years, but Debian is the only one I know that has stayed true. Maybe Slackware also, but Slackware was never great IMO. The only thing people don't like is how old everything is on stable, But, except if you're using something like BTRFS, old is more stable.

Debian is the turtle that will finish the line. If I had to bet which distro will still be around 20 years from now, and still defining the ecosystem, I'd go all in on Debian.

Very well written. I moved to Debian Potato from Red Hat and was amazed of apt-get automatic dependency handling, and how things worked nicely. Debian on those times was a product of love and passion, that is, geekiness.